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Marriage among the Maya of Central America is a model of complementarity between a man and a woman. This union demands mutual respect and mutual service. Yet some husbands beat their wives.

In this pioneering book, Laura McClusky examines the lives of several Mopan Maya women in Belize. Using engaging ethnographic narratives and a highly accessible analysis of the lives that have unfolded before her, McClusky explores Mayan women's strategies for enduring, escaping, and avoiding abuse. Factors such as gender, age inequalities, marriage patterns, family structure, educational opportunities, and economic development all play a role in either preventing or contributing to domestic violence in the village. McClusky argues that using narrative ethnography, instead of cold statistics or dehumanized theoretical models, helps to keep the focus on people, "rehumanizing" our understanding of violence. This highly accessible book brings to the social sciences new ways of thinking about, representing, and studying abuse, marriage, death, gender roles, and violence.

The Masses was the most dynamic and influential left-wing magazine of the early twentieth century, a touchstone for understanding radical thought and social movements in the United States during that era. As a magazine that supported feminist issues, it played a crucial role in shaping public discourse about women's concerns. Women editors, fiction writers, poets, and activists like Mary Heaton Vorse, Louise Bryant, Adriana Spadoni, Elsie Clews Parsons, Inez Haynes Gillmore, and Helen Hull contributed as significantly to the magazine as better-known male figures.

In this major revisionist work, Margaret C. Jones calls for reexamination of the relevance of Masses feminism to that of the 1990s. She explores women contributors' perspectives on crucial issues: patriarchy, birth control, the labor movement, woman suffrage, pacifism, and ethnicity. The book includes numerous examples of the writings and visual art of Masses women and a series of biographical/bibliographical sketches designed to aid other researchers.

How southern universities continue to wrestle with the words and symbols that embody and perpetuate Old South traditions

The US South is a rhetorical landscape that pulsates with division, a place where words and symbols rooted in a deeply problematic past litter the ground and contaminate the soil. Stephen M. Monroe’s provocative study focuses on predominantly white southern universities where Old South rhetoric still reverberates, where rebel flags cast a shadow over attempts at racial harmony, school cheers to reinforce racial barriers, and student yearbooks to create and protect an oppressive culture of exclusion. Across the region, in college towns like Oxford, Mississippi; Athens, Georgia; and Tuscaloosa, Alabama—communities remain locked in a difficult, recursive, and inherently rhetorical struggle that wrestles with this troubling legacy.

Words, images, and symbols are not merely passive artifacts of southern history, Monroe argues, but formative agents that influence human behavior and shape historical events. Drawing on research from many disciplines, including rhetoric, southern studies, history, sociology, and African American studies, Monroe develops the concept of confederate rhetoric: the collection of Old South words and symbols that have been and remain central to the identity conflicts of the South. He charts examples of such rhetoric at work in southern universities from Reconstruction to the present day.

Tracing the long life and legacy of Old South words and symbols at southern universities, this book provides close and nuanced analysis of the rhetorical conflicts that have resulted at places like the University of Mississippi and the University of Missouri. Some conflicts erupted during the civil rights movement, when the first African American students sought admission to all-white southern universities and colleges, and others are brewing now, as African Americans (and their progressive white peers) begin to cement genuine agency and voice in these communities. Tensions have been, and remain, high.

Ultimately, Monroe offers hope and optimism, contending that if words and symbols can be used to damage and divide, then words and symbols can also be used to heal and unify. Racist rhetoric can be replaced by antiracist rhetoric. The old South can become new. While resisting naïve or facile arguments, Heritage and Hate ultimately finds the promise of progress within the tremendous power of language.

In this vital and groundbreaking book, Megha Mohan introduces readers to a range of fascinating, women-led societies. Inspired by her great-grandmother’s matrilineal community in South India, Mohan explores communities around the globe—from controversial feminist online troll networks in South Korea to older women co-housing in Paris and North London to the Rain Queens of South Africa. The result is a vivid, global portrait of women’s communities.

Through extensive research and exclusive first-hand reporting, Mohan goes in search of the roots of women-led societies, revealing a vibrant global history brought together for the first time. She also takes us into modern spaces where women live on their own terms, showing us how we can rethink society for new ways of living, working, and collaborating.

For anyone interested in our collective histories, cultures, economics, and governance, Herlands shows the power and possibility of new ways of living—and leading—for us all. It’s an important landmark exploration for our times that not only explores fascinating ways of living but also addresses broader questions about new ways to think and govern and why it matters.

First introduced in the pages of X-Men, Storm is probably the most recognized Black female superhero. She is also one of the most powerful characters in the Marvel Universe, with abilities that allow her to control the weather itself. Yet that power is almost always deployed in the service of White characters, and Storm is rarely treated as an authority figure. 
 
Hero Me Not offers an in-depth look at this fascinating yet often frustrating character through all her manifestations in comics, animation, and films. Chesya Burke examines the coding of Storm as racially “exotic,” an African woman who nonetheless has bright white hair and blue eyes and was portrayed onscreen by biracial actresses Halle Berry and Alexandra Shipp. She shows how Storm, created by White writers and artists, was an amalgam of various Black stereotypes, from the Mammy and the Jezebel to the Magical Negro, resulting in a new stereotype she terms the Negro Spiritual Woman. 
 
With chapters focusing on the history, transmedia representation, and racial politics of Storm, Burke offers a very personal account of what it means to be a Black female comics fan searching popular culture for positive images of powerful women who look like you. 

Latin American history traditionally has been defined by larger-than-life heroes such as Símon Bolívar, Emiliano Zapata, and Evita Perón. Recent scholarship, however, tends to emphasize social and cultural factors rather than great leaders. In this new collection, Samuel Brunk and Ben Fallaw bring heroes back to the center of the debate, arguing that heroes not only shape history, they also "tell us a great deal about the places from which they come."

The original essays in this collection examine ten modern Latin American heroes whose charisma derived from the quality of their relationships with admirers, rather than their innate personal qualities. The rise of mass media, for instance, helped pave the way for populists such as radio actress-turned-hero Evita Perón. On the other hand, heroes who become president often watch their images crumble, as policies replace personality in the eyes of citizens. In the end, the editors argue, there is no formula for Latin American heroes, who both forge, and are forged by, unique national events. The conclusion points toward Mexico, where the peasant revolutions that elevated Miguel Hidalgo and, later, Emiliano Zapata are so revered that today's would-be heroes, such as the EZLN's Subcomandante Marcos, must link themselves to peasant mythology even when their personal roots are far from native ground. The enduring (or, in some cases, fading) influence of those discussed in this volume validates the central placement of heroes in Latin American history.

This volume focuses on a large group of decorated terracotta plaques, from the sixth to fourth centuries BCE. These molded plaques were discovered with other offerings in a sanctuary deposit excavated near Sparta more than fifty years ago, but they have remained unpublished until now. They number over 1,500 complete and fragmentary pieces. In technique, style, and iconography they form a homogeneous group unlike any other from mainland Greece. The large number of plaques and variety of types reveal a stable and vigorous coroplastic tradition in Lakonia during the late Archaic and Classical period.

Heroic Offerings will be of interest to students and scholars of Greek history, art, and archaeology, to those interested in ancient religious practice in the Mediterranean, and to all inspired by Athens’ chief political rival, Sparta.

This volume received financial support from the Archaeological Institute of America.

Often depicted as the nation’s iconic legal immigrant, unauthorized European migrants are often overlooked by scholars, policymakers, and the media. This volume tells the stories of European migrants who adopted irregular migration strategies to enter and remain in the United States throughout the twentieth century. Contributors explore facets of this history with essays on migration patterns from Russia, Italy, Ireland, the Ottoman Empire, and Poland. They also offer important arguments about the treatment of unauthorized European migrants by states and societies on both sides of the Atlantic and how the reception of undocumented immigrants has been and continues to be impacted by the dynamics of racial, class, and gender constructions in the United States and abroad. As the contributors show, the reception accorded unauthorized European migrants frequently obscured and even normalized their irregular migration strategies, easing their access to American citizenship.

Revealing and insightful, Hidden Histories of Unauthorized Migrations from Europe to the United States sheds new light our intertwined notions of race, legality, and immigration.

Contributors: Danielle Battisti, Ashley Johnson Bavery, Mary Patrice Erdmans, Polina Ermoshkina, Torsten Feys, Carly Goodman, S. Deborah Kang, E. Kyle Romero, Randa Tawil, and Joanna Wojdon

Current Arguments in Composition Series

The Hidden Inequities in Labor-Based Contract Grading intervenes in the increasingly popular practice of labor-based grading by expanding the scope of this assessment practice to include students who are disabled and multiply marginalized. Through the lens of disability studies, the book critiques the assumption that labor is a neutral measure by which to assess students and explores how labor-based grading contracts put certain groups of students at a disadvantage. Ellen C. Carillo offers engagement-based grading contracts as an alternative that would provide a more equitable assessment model for students of color, those with disabilities, and students who are multiply marginalized.
 
This short book explores the history of labor-based grading contracts, reviews the scholarship on this assessment tool, highlights the ways in which it normalizes labor as an unbiased tool, and demonstrates how to extend the conversation in new and generative ways both in research and in classrooms. Carillo encourages instructors to reflect on their assessment practices by demonstrating how even assessment methods that are designed through a social-justice lens may unintentionally privilege some students over others.
 

WINNER OF THE ASSOCIATION OF BLACK WOMEN HISTORIANS 2020 LETITIA WOODS-BROWN AWARD FOR THE BEST BOOK IN AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN'S HISTORY 

WINNER OF THE WESTERN ASSOCIATION OF WOMEN HISTORIAN'S BARBARA “PENNY” KANNER AWARD

2021 FINALIST FOR THE HARRIET TUBMAN BOOK PRIZE

2020 FINALIST BERSHIRE CONFERENCE OF WOMEN HISTORIANS BOOK PRIZE

Uncovering the Afro-Argentine women behind the myth of a white nation.

Argentina promotes itself as a country of European immigrants. This makes it an exception to other Latin American countries, which embrace a more mixed—African, Indian, European—heritage. Hiding in Plain Sight: Black Women, the Law, and the Making of a White Argentine Republic traces the origins of what some white Argentines mischaracterize as a “black disappearance” by delving into the intimate lives of black women and explaining how they contributed to the making of a “white” Argentina. Erika Denise Edwards has produced the first comprehensive study in English of the history of African descendants outside of Buenos Aires in the late colonial and early republican periods, with a focus on how these women sought whiteness to better their lives and that of their children.

Edwards argues that attempts by black women to escape the stigma of blackness by recategorizing themselves and their descendants as white began as early as the late eighteenth century, challenging scholars who assert that the black population drastically declined at the end of the nineteenth century because of the whitening or modernization process. She further contends that in Córdoba, Argentina, women of African descent (such as wives, mothers, daughters, and concubines) were instrumental in shaping their own racial reclassifications and destinies.

This volume makes use of a wealth of sources to relate these women’s choices. The sources consulted include city censuses and notarial and probate records that deal with free and enslaved African descendants; criminal, ecclesiastical, and civil court cases; marriages and baptisms records and newsletters. These varied sources provide information about the day-to-day activities of cordobés society and how women of African descent lived, formed relationships, thrived, and partook in the transformation of racial identities in Argentina.